Tag: relaxation

The Cost of Relaxing

This past weekend, I stood at a fence in the Texas Hill Country and watched the sun sink behind the trees. The sky was painted in shades of orange and gold, and for a little while there was nowhere I needed to be. No emails demanding a response. No office politics or drama. No laundry. No mental checklist scrolling endlessly through my brain. Just a beautiful sunset, a good friend, and a quiet moment at the end of the day.

As I stood there, I felt something that has become surprisingly rare in my life.

Peace.

Not excitement. Not distraction. Not the temporary relief that comes from checking something off a to-do list. Actual peace. The kind that settles deep enough that you don’t realize how tightly you’ve been holding yourself together until you finally let go.

Since coming home, I’ve been trying to understand why relaxing has always been so difficult for me. For years, I assumed I was simply bad at it. Bad at vacations. Bad at long weekends. Bad at sitting still. Even when I’m exhausted, there is a part of me that resists slowing down. But I think I’m finally starting to understand why.

Maybe I don’t struggle to relax because I don’t enjoy it. Maybe I struggle to relax because I know what comes next.

The truth is that when I genuinely relax, re-entering my normal life feels catastrophic to my mind, body, and nervous system. Within hours of getting home, my stomach was in knots. The headaches returned. My thoughts started racing ahead to Monday before Sunday was even over. It felt like my body was rebelling against being asked to step back into a life that had suddenly become much louder than it was two days earlier.

And that made me wonder if this is why vacations have always carried a strange anxiety for me. Not because I don’t want to go. Not because I don’t enjoy them. Quite the opposite. Maybe it’s because somewhere deep down I know the bill is coming due when I get back.

When you’re living inside stress every day, you adapt to it. You normalize it. You convince yourself that the tension in your shoulders, the knot in your stomach, the racing thoughts, and the constant feeling of bracing for impact are simply part of adulthood. Part of work. Part of life. You become so accustomed to carrying the weight that you stop noticing how heavy it is.

Then something happens. A girls’ trip. A vacation. A long weekend. A sunset over the Hill Country. For forty-eight hours, you set the load down.

The problem is that once you’ve remembered what it feels like to put it down, picking it back up feels almost unbearable.

I used to think that meant relaxing wasn’t worth it. Why spend two wonderful days away if you’re going to spend the next several days paying for it with headaches, nausea, anxiety, and exhaustion? Why look forward to vacations if returning home feels so difficult?

Lately, though, I’m starting to think I’ve been asking the wrong question.

Maybe the problem isn’t that relaxation makes me sick. Maybe relaxation reveals how sick stress has made me. Maybe those forty-eight hours didn’t create the contrast. Maybe they simply exposed it. Maybe standing at that fence watching the sun disappear beyond the trees wasn’t an escape from reality at all. Maybe it was the first honest glimpse of what life feels like when my nervous system isn’t constantly running a marathon.

I don’t know exactly what to do with that realization yet. What I do know is that if two days of peace can feel that good, and returning to normal can feel that hard, perhaps the goal isn’t to avoid relaxing. Perhaps the goal is to build a life that doesn’t feel so impossible to return to once I’ve remembered what peace feels like.

Blessings y’all – Amy

The Pressure of Free Time…

There’s a very specific kind of giddiness that comes with a long weekend as an adult. It starts sometime around Thursday afternoon, when you realize there’s an extra day sitting out there waiting for you. By Friday, it feels full of possibility in a way regular weekends never quite do. One extra day somehow tricks your brain into believing you suddenly have time to become fully rested, productive, creative, organized, and caught up on life, friends, and family all at once.

The mental list starts building almost immediately. You’re going to sew. Clean out a closet. Take a nap. Water the plants. Sit outside with a glass of wine and actually relax for once. Maybe read. Maybe organize. Maybe do absolutely nothing for a little while and not feel guilty about it.

But somewhere between all the possibilities and all the pressure we quietly place on ourselves, the long weekend starts feeling less restful and more overwhelming.

At least it’s that way for me.

Because instead of simply enjoying the extra time, my brain starts trying to carefully distribute it. Even now it’s sitting here whirring trying to figure out what I’m going to jump off this chair and get done. If I spend the afternoon sewing, I probably should’ve been productive. If I spend the day cleaning and organizing, I’ll feel disappointed that I never actually rested. If I sit still too long, I start mentally calculating all the things I “should” be doing instead. If I worked a little Monday somehow my week next week won’t be so bad. And somehow having too many choices leaves me oddly stuck, drifting from one thing to another without ever fully settling into any of them.

Then suddenly it’s Monday evening. The weekend is over. The house still isn’t completely done. Half the projects remain untouched. The rest somehow didn’t feel restful enough. And despite having an extra day off, you’re still tired and somehow emotionally unprepared to go back to work.

I think part of the problem is that many of us have forgotten how to let free time simply exist without turning it into another thing to manage well. 🙋🏻‍♀️ We approach long weekends with such high expectations. Surely this is the weekend we’ll finally catch up, recharge, reset, organize life, and become the version of ourselves who has it all together.

But maybe that’s too much pressure to place on a few open days.

The older I get, the more I think the best weekends are rarely the ones where everything gets done. They’re usually the quieter ones. The ones where you laugh a little, rest a little, wander through a project because you want to instead of because you scheduled it, and maybe sit outside at the end of the day with a glass of wine realizing you didn’t maximize every minute… but you lived in some of them.

Maybe the goal of a long weekend was never to fix our exhaustion in the first place. Maybe it was simply meant to give us a little room to breathe.

Blessings Ya’ll – Amy